HOW DO YOU LIKE CRAFTING YOUR ITEMS?

BAD EMMYCH

NO COOKIE FOR SOLDIERS OF THE IDOCRACY

Okay but seriously, I like having interesting choices, and I like having lots of them, and I like it when they interact with each-other in interesting ways. I like it when the options are balanced, but not when different choices just make me worse at different parts of the game - I like it when the crafting is a puzzle I have to figure out. I like it when I have the ability to assemble the pieces of gameplay together in the right combinations to powerful parties that can handle any situation. I also like it when there are reasons to sometimes not do that. What I'm trying to say is that I like fucking RPGs, man.

And I like it when those choices matter, which requires the game to have some level of difficulty, because what's even the point of this whole thing if you can make all kinds of terrible choices all over the place and it won't affect your outcome?

If your crafting involves resource-gathering, it's gonna get ugly a lot faster. That seems much easier to get wrong than, say, the ability to choose between upgrades by spending gold, by finding a specific treasure that can be forged into several options, or by equipping support materia to your weapon in the menu.

Not that every game gets it wrong! In some games the crafting resources work really well. The first two Kingdom Hearts games, for example, successfully made me care about and enjoy gathering the needed crafting resources to make items. Part of it was that you could see the whole list ahead of time and only needed to get each item once, so there was a strong feeling of satisfaction as you checked items off your list. Part of it was that every enemy in the game dropped crafting materials, and many enemies shared drops with other enemies, so you were never forced to fight one specific enemy over and over. Part of it was that the game had lots of other incentives to go back and redo older sections of the game anyway, to get a better score or find secret chests or for other reasons, so you almost never actually went out of your way to get materials. And part of it was some manipulative voodoo psychology that I don't understand, which caused me to have fun against my will.

To me, I believe the most interesting way to craft is a la Star Ocean / Star Ocean 2. The system was genuinelly interesting -- you had several distinct "craft" abilities, characters with a few predefined preferences, and a multitude of possible results -- variables being the random factor, skill level and the materials used. It was really nice and fun! Every level you gained a new point to spend on one of those particular abilities. What made it even more interesting is that raising those also raised a few combat-specific stats! For instance, I remember butchering foes with my healer (Rena)'s attack command, because she had such a high level in Kitchen Knife, which'd give 20xlevel in attack power to the character.

Besides, the animations were really cool as well, and the awesome soundtrack only helped to make it better. I think it's the most awesome iteration of an RPG crafting system, ever.

Dunno, but I'm planning to implement a pain in the a$$ system where you hire different "crafters," who specialize in different weapon types. It'll be a huge headache for the player, and you'll probably all hate it. ;-)

KH had good crafting systems, I agree.

-flap

Whenever I think of crafting systems in development, I can almost feel the demons of unworthy payload tearing my brain in two. If it's too simple and you have a few options to make weapons, and you have to collect resources from random enemies to make said weapons, it's a grindy, messy hodgepodge of "I'm not putting up with this today". If it's something like putting bonuses on a myriad of standard strength weapons, I invision staring down into an endless abyss that needs to be filled because there's just no way in hell that I'm going to make 20 different iterations of each item.

Like, take this for example: a potion - very simple and moderately useful - we've all seen 'em before. Now imagine being able to put bonuses onto that potion, like elemental resistances, stat buffs, ailment heals, boosted health healing, resurrection. Now take the standard categories of this thing and just tie it onto the text description under "Potion".

Potion: Heals 100 HP and increases fire resistance
Potion: Heals 100 HP and increases water resistance
Potion: Heals 100 HP and increases lightning resistance
Potion: Heals 100 HP and increases earth resistance
Potion: Heals 100 HP and increases wind resistance
Potion: Heals 100 HP and increases ice resistance
Potion: Heals 100 HP and increases holy resistance
Potion: Heals 100 HP and increases dark resistance
Potion: Heals 100 HP and heals poison
Potion: Heals 100 HP and heals silence
Potion: Heals 100 HP and heals blind
Potion: Heals 100 HP and heals confuse
Potion: Heals 100 HP and heals berserk
Potion: Heals 100 HP and heals paralyze
Potion: Heals 100 HP and revives character
Potion: Heals 100 HP and grants STR +
Potion: Heals 100 HP and grants DEF +
Potion: Heals 100 HP and grants INT +
Potion: Heals 100 HP and grants AGL +
Potion: Heals 200 HP (couple this with any of the previously mentioned bonuses)
Potion: Heals 300 HP (couple this with any of the previously mentioned bonuses)

It's too much. I give up.

This is one kind of item. Now imagine doing this for every item in your database. Mmhmm... here's a tissue.

I have yet to find an overall good game that had a worthwhile crafting mechanism. Final Fantasy 9 (and I love that game to bits) didn't really feel like it had a crafting system, more a bartering system because you'd trade a weapon or armor and some item for something completely different. It'd be like trading with wandering NPCs in the .hack PS2 series; you just throw items into a pit in the hopes that it's worth enough to buy that one thing you really want.